Category: Fact Check

Kate Middleton, the princess of Wales, announced her cancer diagnosis in March. But her husband, William, prince of Wales and heir to the throne, has not made an announcement about her health since then, as social media posts suggest.

“Prince William announces heartbreak: ‘My wife, it’s over…’,” multiple Facebook posts said. The comment section of the posts contain links to blog posts that say William “said he hasn’t seen much of his wife lately due to her health issues, which has affected his life.”Another linked blog post says William discussed his family’s health at a charity fundraiser dinner. But none of the blog posts mention Prince William saying, “My wife, it’s over.” 

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Middleton said March 22 in a video message that she is undergoing chemotherapy after being diagnosed with cancer. 

Twice in May, William told people who have inquired about Kate’s health that she is “well.” 

The Facebook posts include an image of William embracing his brother, Prince William. A reverse-image search led us to a 2023 Medium blog authored by someone who creates artificial intelligence images and who said he created the picture using the AI program Midjourney.

(Screenshot from Facebook)

The other Facebook posts contained an image of Middleton from 2022, when she discussed mental health for new parents.

We searched Google and the Nexis news database and found no credible reports of William describing Middleton’s health by saying, “It’s over.”

We rate the claim that Prince William announced a heartbreak, saying, “My wife, it’s over,” False. 

A 2012 viral image by a Syrian artist of a Statue of Liberty-inspired structure is being mischaracterized online. 

“A Syrian artist built this with the ruins of his house,” a May 23 Facebook post said. The post includes an image of building blocks reconstructed to resemble the Statue of Liberty. 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

But Tammam Azzam, the art’s creator, has repeatedly told media outlets that the image was made digitally, not from his home’s ruins. 

Azzam first shared the image on Facebook in 2012 with the caption, “Statue of Liberty (Photomontage).” A photomontage is created by combining multiple photographs. 

Azzam told Agence France-Presse in 2021 that he created the artwork on a computer. “It was part of my photomontage series I did in Dubai (United Arab Emirates in) 2012, and it’s clearly photographed, repeated parts and scanned paper,” Azzam said. 

He also told Al Arabiya, a Saudi state-owned news channel, in 2016 that his artwork had been wrongly interpreted. 

Azzam’s website includes many other photomontages. His website details how he uses “graphic design as a tool with which to overlay photos of destroyed buildings with European master paintings.” 

We rate the claim that this image shows a Statue of Liberty replica built from a Syrian artist’s house ruins False. 

As President Joe Biden runs for reelection, Republicans have argued that he’s responsible for high levels of crime. Biden has responded by saying that violent crime has actually fallen on his watch.

In May 15 remarks at a national police memorial service at the U.S. Capitol, Biden told officers and other attendees, “You risk your lives every day for the safety of the people you don’t even know. That’s why each of you, each and every one of you, is a hero. It’s no accident that violent crime is near a record 50-year low.”

Official FBI data on crime tends to lag, but available measures show overall violent crime has fallen during Biden’s presidency. But is violent crime “near a record 50-year low,” as Biden said?

We checked the FBI data and found that he’s on target.

The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.

Four types of crime comprise the FBI’s definition of violent crime: homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. 

Over the past six decades, the FBI’s methodology has changed in small ways that make such long-term comparisons apples-to-oranges. Notably, the FBI changed its definition for rape in 2013 to expand the types of physical contact that are considered rape. This means recent data on rape shows more cases, making the overall violent crime rate higher than under the old definition.

To test Biden’s claim, we used a set of FBI crime data assembled by Jeff Asher, an analyst for AH Datalytics. Asher collected the data from 1960 to 2022, using data for the original definition of rape to enable an apples-to-apples comparison across time.

Viewed broadly, the violent crime rate rose through the 1970s and 1980s, peaking in 1991 and falling since, according to his analysis. The rate has had a few upward blips, notably during the coronavirus pandemic, but it remains far lower than it was at its early 1990s peak.

There are two ways to determine which time span to use when analyzing the FBI data. It could cover either the 50 years from 1972 to 2022 (the most recent 50 years available in full-year FBI data) or the 48 years from 1974 to 2022 (using 1974 because it was 50 years from when Biden made the claim).

We looked at the FBI data analyzed by Asher for both time spans, and using either one, Biden is right that the 2022 data is “near” a 50-year low.

In 1972, there were 401 violent crimes per 100,000 population; in 1974, there were 461 violent crimes per 100,000 population.

Both of those data points are higher than the 2022 figure of just under 370 violent crimes per 100,000 residents.

2022 would have been the absolute lowest year of the past 50 except for two marginal drops below the 2022 level, in 2014 and 2019. (In both of those years, the violent crime rate was 364 per 100,000).

Other types of crime statistics, including the National Crime Victimization Survey, show current levels of violent crime far lower than their peaks in the early 1990s. 

If the preliminary decline seen in the 2023 private-sector estimate holds up with the full-year FBI data, Asher said, then the 2023 FBI figure would sink to the lowest level of the past 50 years.

“A decline in violent crime of pretty much any magnitude would lead 2023’s rate to be lower than 2014’s and 2019’s,” Asher said.

But Biden’s statement couched it as “near” the 50-year low, which is accurate.

“Biden’s statement about violent crime is absolutely true,” Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox said. “Despite a spike in murder in 2020 amidst the emergence of  COVID, even homicides have declined.”

Our ruling

Biden said, “Violent crime is near a record 50-year low.”

The FBI’s violent crime rate for 2022, the last year officially available, was 370 per 100,000 population. Since 1972, only two years have had a lower violent crime rate: 2014 and 2019.

Preliminary estimates for 2023 show the violent crime rate continuing to fall. And if that  replicates in the final FBI data, 2023 will become the lowest year for the violent crime rate in 50 years outright.

We rate the statement True.

From the earliest days of the Israel-Hamas war, global leaders have questioned the reliability of fatality data coming out of Gaza. In October, without citing a specific reason, President Joe Biden said he had “no confidence” in the numbers.

Today, the overall figure of people dead is reported at about 35,000. But there’s no clear understanding about how many of these people are combatants and how many are civilians.

That’s because over most of the conflict, the figures have come from Gaza’s Ministry of Health, an agency of the region’s Hamas-controlled government. 

Hamas, identified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 1997,  has ruled Gaza since it swept a majority in 2006 parliamentary elections. After Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 people, Israel in its retaliation largely blocked foreign journalists from entering the Gaza strip. Israeli protesters blocked humanitarian aid. And Israeli attacks crushed Gaza’s infrastructure, fueling mounting concern about the Ministry of Health’s fatality data’s accuracy. 

Without any other options, the United Nations and other leaders rely on Hamas government figures despite little transparency over its sources or methodology. 

Its Ministry of Health describes all casualties as victims of “Israeli aggression.”

Confusion over the figures reached a boiling point May 8, when the U.N. released data that showed a significant reduction in the number of women and children who had died Gaza:  

On May 6, the U.N. had reported greater than 9,500 women and greater than 14,500 children dead. Two days later, the figures showed 4,959 women and 7,797 children.

“UN halves estimates of women and children killed in Gaza,” MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” cohost Joe Scarborough wrote in a May 12 X post. Scarborough shared a May 11 Jerusalem Post article and said, “Apparently, the Hamas figures repeatedly cited are false.”

Israeli officials also seized on the change: “The miraculous resurrection of the dead in Gaza,” Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote in a May 13 X post. “The @UN had reduced its estimate of women and children killed in Gaza by 50% and claims that it relied on data from the Hamas Ministry of Health. Anyone who relies on fake data from a terrorist organization in order to promote blood libels against Israel is antisemitic and supports terrorism.” 

Another May 13 Instagram post said, “The UN quietly admitted the casualty numbers in Gaza were OVER INFLATED by nearly half.” 

Others said that critiques of the Ministry of Health’s fatality data went too far. Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that the reported death toll out of Gaza is likely an undercount of what he described as “mass slaughter.”

Louis Charbonneau, the U.N. director at Human Rights Watch, said no one is going to have exact numbers, but the Ministry of Health data is the best available. “Death tolls are a messy business — extremely difficult,” Charbonneau said. “And at the end of the day, no one is expecting 100% accuracy because it’s just impossible. We know the number’s big.” 

How much can the available data tell us? It’s complicated.

Mourners on May 19, 2024, pray over the bodies of Palestinians who were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, at the Al Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip. (AP)

Did the fatality statistics get ‘halved’?

Not according to the U.N.’s explanation. 

Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the United Nations Secretary-General, said the overall number of fatalities recorded by authorities in Gaza and reported by the U.N. have “remained unchanged at more than 35,000 people” since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a violent attack on Israel. But the subcategorization on deaths of women and children changed because the ministry provided an updated breakdown of those whose identities it said had been fully documented. This was a smaller subset of the total number of fatalities.

Typically, when a conflict occurs, the U.N. gets its casualty data from what Haq described as “our trusted sources on the ground,” then it cross-checks that information. The scale and intensity of the fighting in Gaza, however, sets this conflict apart and, in this case, Haq said, the U.N. has no means to verify firsthand the Ministry of Health’s data. 

Although the data cannot be interpreted as incontrovertible, the U.N., World Health Organization and organizations that track conflict casualties said Hamas’ government-sourced data should not be dismissed outright.

Following previous conflicts, the U.N.’s efforts to independently verify the Ministry of Health’s fatality data found only small discrepancies. That said, this conflict stands apart in its scale of destruction, experts said, making the statistics’ reliability more of an open question.

Between the May 6 and May 8 updates, the total number of reported fatalities increased from 34,735 people to 34,844 people, including a subset of more than 10,000 people “reported missing or under the rubble.” 

(Screenshot from the United Nations.)

The Government Media Office provided the May 6 estimate of reported fatalities, which included more than 9,500 women and more than 14,500 children. The U.N.’s May 8 graphic’s demographic breakdown is what sparked confusion and concern.

That graphic shows the Ministry of Health’s data for a smaller subset of the nearly 35,000 reported casualties, Haq said. It provides a breakdown of demographic information for 24,686 people the ministry had fully identified with their dates of birth and death, gender and ID number and whose deaths it had documented as of April 30, U.N. spokesperson Jens Laerke explained May 17.

During a May 13 briefing, Haq said the change came after the Ministry of Health provided an updated breakdown of fatalities “for whom full details have been documented.” 

(Screenshot from the United Nations.)

“Out of those, then — out of that smaller number, that subset of identified bodies — you have 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly and 10,006 men,” Haq said during the briefing. People in the “elderly” group are not categorized by gender.

The Ministry of Health told the U.N. that it is still in the process of detailing the identities of all who are found dead, according to Haq.

We tried to contact the Government Media Office and Ministry of Health for additional information about the data but did not hear back. 

How are deaths being recorded?

Early in the conflict, fatality data came from public and private hospitals, where medical workers recorded names, ages, genders and ID numbers of people who died. The information went into an electronic database, according to news reports. 

Attacks on hospitals and communications blackouts significantly impacted the quality of data over time, researchers at organizations that track data about armed conflict told us. 

On Dec. 11, 2023, the Ministry of Health announced in a statistical digest that it had started incorporating media sources for its fatality figures, said David Adesnik, a senior fellow and research director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative, foreign policy-focused think tank. The ministry did not identify what media sources it was relying on but the proportion of data coming from media accounts increased over time, Adesnik said: “Media sources served as the documentation for more than three-fourths of deaths counted during the first three months of 2024.”

The biggest change in the U.N.’s data in early May wasn’t the data format, but its source, Adesnik said. 

The May 6 update sourced its information on women and children killed to the Government Media Office; the May 8 update identified only the Ministry of Health.

During a May 17 press briefing, Laerke said that the U.N. views the Ministry of Health as the “best available source” for fatality data. Although the Government Media Office breakdown was used for a period when the ministry couldn’t provide data, the U.N. switched back to the ministry’s data when it became available again “because we provide the best available data at the time of reporting.” 

Smoke rises May 21, 2024, following an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel. (AP)

What’s uncertain about the death toll in Gaza?

Salma Eissa, Middle East research manager for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, said data quality has diminished.

“There has been a discernible downward trend in the quality of the data, which has continued since mid-February when only three of the eight Gaza hospitals meant to track fatalities were doing so,” Eissa said, citing April analysis by U.K.-based Action on Armed Violence, which records and investigates armed violence against civilians globally.

Rachel Taylor, the executive director at Every Casualty Counts, a U.K.-based organization that focuses on recording and identifying armed violence deaths, said that the current scale of devastation means the Ministry of Health’s data collection methodology “can no longer be applied consistently” as it has in the past. 

“Over the course of the violence, the hospitals have been destroyed,” said Taylor, who anticipates the actual numbers are higher than is being reported. “The morgues have been destroyed. The paper records have been destroyed. Healthcare professionals have been killed or displaced.”

In the May 12 episode of the “Call Me Back” podcast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that about 14,000 combatants had been killed “and probably around 16,000 civilians have been killed.” We contacted the Israeli Defense Forces for additional information about that data and received no response. 

Experts at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project cautioned that the Ministry of Health’s list of identified fatalities includes some deaths that might be attributable to Palestinian armed groups or have undetermined causes. 

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

A bill that would exclude noncitizens from the U.S. Census count that determines the number of congressional seats in each state has spurred misleading claims online. 

“In case you missed it, every single Democrat in the House just voted for illegal immigrants to count toward representation in Congress and the Electoral College,” a woman in an Instagram video says. She continues, “If the legal citizens won’t vote for you, and having the dead people attempt to vote for you isn’t working, bring in, just bring in the illegals.”

The video includes a screenshot of an article from the Not the Bee, a news website that is an offshoot of satirical website The Babylon Bee. 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The full article references the Equal Representation Act, a bill that would add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census to exclude noncitizens from the population count that determines congressional apportionment. Noncitizens are now counted in the census and have been for more than 200 years.

No Democrats voted in favor of the bill. The bill’s critics said excluding noncitizens from Congressional apportionment violates the Constitution. 

The U.S. Census has always counted noncitizens, and in voting against the Equal Representation Act, Democrats opted to keep the system as is. The bill passed with a majority in the House of Representatives and has been sent to the Senate. 

The U.S. House of Representatives has 435 seats. Each state automatically receives one seat, and the remaining seats are allocated based on population size as reported in the U.S. Census, which is conducted every 10 years. The number of electoral votes allocated to each state is also based on the census. 

Thomas Wolf, democracy initiatives director at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, said the U.S. Census has counted every person living in the U.S., regardless of citizenship status, since the first census was conducted in 1790. He said the only exceptions were Native Americans who were not taxed and therefore were not counted, and enslaved people who were counted as three-fifths of a person until the passage of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. 

Since 1790, the census has also been used to determine the number of seats each state has in the House of Representatives. 

Dan Vicuña, the redistricting and representation director at Common Cause, a voting rights group, told PolitiFact, “Making residents of the United States invisible for the purposes of congressional apportionment would be a clear violation of the U.S. constitution.” 

The 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868, says representatives should be apportioned to states based on the “whole number” of people in each state, and it does not make exceptions for people’s immigration status.  

The Equal Representation Act is not the first time politicians have tried to change who’s counted in the census. Former President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried in 2020 to exclude noncitizens from the census count and congressional apportionment. 

Wolf sent us an amicus brief that census historians wrote when Trump’ tried changing redistricting processes; the brief said excluding immigrants in the U.S. illegally from congressional apportionment violates the Constitution. 

PolitiFact found that  excluding noncitizens from congressional apportionment would not necessarily benefit Democratic-led states. Republican-led states have experienced significant increases in immigrant populations in recent years.​

Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce didn’t threaten to quit over teammate Harrison Butker’s recent controversial college commencement speech, but fake news stories reporting as much are being taken out of context online. 

“Breaking news,” a May 19 Facebook post said. “Travis Kelce takes a stand, ‘I will resign if Harrison Butker is on the team next season.’”

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

We found no credible news stories or other sources to corroborate this claim, although wedid find several similar social media and blog posts that were clearly labeled as satire. 

Among them: that Kelce “vows to quit Chiefs immediately if team doesn’t fire Harrison Butker.”

Kansas City head coach Andy Reid told reporters May 22 that no one with the team has complained about Butker’s remarks.

Kelce, meanwhile, called Butker a “great person and a great teammate” on a recent episode of his podcast. Kelce said Butker’s comments, which included encouraging women to be homemakers, were Butker’s opinions. 

“I can’t say I agree with the majority of it, or just about any of it, outside of him loving his family and his kids. And I don’t think that I should judge him by his views, especially his religious views of how to go about life—that’s just not who I am.”  

We rate claims that Kelce threatened to quit False.

 

Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder joined critics of Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who said in a recent college commencement speech that homemaker was “one of the most important titles” a woman could have. 

“There’s nothing more masculine than a strong man supporting a strong woman,” Vedder said at a May 18 show in Las Vegas.

Pearl Jam doesn’t have any upcoming shows in Kansas City, according to the tour information on the band’s website, but that’s not because the city canceled planned concerts in allegiance with Butker. 

“Kansas City cancels three Pearl Jam shows at Arrowhead Stadium: ‘We stand with Harrison Butker,’” read a May 21 Facebook post.

It was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

This claim originated on the Facebook account of a self-described satire site. America’s Last Line of Defense, which describes itself as the flagship of a “network of trolley” and is labeled “satire/parody” on Facebook, posted an image of Vedder and Butker on May 20 with text that said, “Kansas City cancels three Pearl Jam shows at Arrowhead Stadium: ‘We stand with Harrison Butker.’”
We found no news stories or other evidence that Kansas City canceled upcoming Pearl Jam shows. 

We rate claims that this happened False.

 

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, some social media users continue to spread false claims that the 2020 presidential contest was stolen, pointing to purported fraud in Georgia as evidence.

A May 9 Instagram post claimed that Fulton County, Georgia, election officials “scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during the recount of the 2020 presidential election.” The post also claimed, “There are 380,761 ballot images from machine count that are not available from 2020 elections.”

The post’s caption read, “Georgia was stolen. But they swore there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. Now there’s proof.”

Other Instagram posts made similar claims about double-scanned ballots and missing ballot images from the 2020 election in Georgia.

These claims went viral after a May 7 Georgia Elections Board meeting in which board members heard testimony and received findings from a state investigation into multiple allegations of 2020 election fraud in Fulton County. The largely Democratic county, which includes parts of Atlanta, has often been at the center of 2020 voter fraud claims.

The secretary of state’s office began investigating after Georgia resident Joseph Rossi and Texas resident Kevin Moncla filed a complaint in 2022. The complaint accused Fulton County of improperly recounting the 2020 presidential election and said the complainants had found other voting irregularities.

State investigators told the Georgia Elections Board they found errors in Fulton County’s recount of the 2020 presidential contest, but the discrepancies did not significantly change the election results.

Because of these errors, the Georgia Elections Board voted 2-1 to reprimand Fulton County elections officials and ordered the county to install an independent election monitor ahead of the 2024 election.

In the Peach State’s 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by 11,779 votes. Three vote counts — the initial machine tabulation, a hand-counted risk-limiting audit and a machine recount — produced similar vote tallies that confirmed Biden’s victory in Georgia.

Did Fulton County officials scan thousands of 2020 ballots twice?

Fulton County election officials scanned some 2020 ballots twice, but investigators couldn’t determine whether they were counted twice.

State investigators said during the May 7 meeting that they found 3,075 duplicate ballot images in Fulton County from the statewide machine recount of the 2020 presidential election. They couldn’t determine whether any duplicates were tabulated in the recount.

Ballot images are not counted as votes, the state investigators said. Election workers use these electronic pictures of ballots during vote tabulation to ensure the vote count’s accuracy, they said.

For instance, if a ballot scanner detects an ambiguous mark that it can’t read, an election worker will compare the ballot image with the paper ballot to determine where the mark is and what it means, Georgia secretary of state spokesperson Mike Hassinger told PolitiFact.

“If the ‘3,000 duplicate ballot images’ had been counted as votes (again, images are not used to count votes) the results would have been off by 3,000 — and they were not,” Hassinger said. Comparing the initial results with the machine recount, there were 880 fewer votes for president counted in the machine recount.

The state investigators explained that the duplicate ballot images likely occurred because an error during the tabulation process required some ballots to be rescanned.

After rescanning these ballots and before submitting the results, election officials could delete the results and ballot images from the first scan, said Charlene McGowan, general counsel for the secretary of state’s office. Election officials might have deleted the duplicate ballot results, but not the duplicate ballot images, she said.

“So, there is a way that it is possible for there to be duplicative ballot images that appear within the images, but not necessarily with the count,” McGowan said. “We can’t say conclusively one way or the other because ballots are anonymous and there’s no way to know for sure.”

Are more than 380,000 ballot images missing from the 2020 election in Fulton County?

State and local officials did not substantiate this claim.

During the May 7 meeting, Elections Board member Janice Johnston asked state investigators and Fulton County officials “why 380,761 ballot images from Election Day” are “not available.” The Georgia Republican Party appointed Johnston to the board in 2022.

McGowan said state investigators subpoenaed Fulton County for its ballot images from the recount, not Election Day, as the recount is what the complaint disputed.

Fulton County officials said at the meeting they didn’t know about this allegation and so could not comment. PolitiFact also contacted Fulton County’s elections office and received no response.

Hassinger also said he didn’t know where this figure originated.

“The proper answer to ‘unavailable ballot images’ of ANY number is ‘So what?’” he said. “It wasn’t required under the law, and images are not used to tally votes.”

In 2020, Georgia law did not require election officials to keep ballot images. In 2021, the state Legislature passed a law requiring ballot images to be retained and subject to public disclosure.

Do these claims mean Georgia’s 2020 election results are invalid?

No. All three vote counts in Georgia confirmed that Biden won the state’s 2020 presidential election.

In Fulton County, specifically, the initial tabulation reported 524,659 votes cast in the presidential contest, including 137,240 votes for Donald Trump and 381,144 votes for Joe Biden.

The risk-limiting audit, conducted by hand, found that 525,293 votes were cast in Fulton County for the presidential election, including 137,620 votes for Trump and 381,179 votes for Biden.

Finally, the machine recount, requested by Trump, reported 523,779 votes cast for president in Fulton County. Trump received 137,247 of those votes, a net gain of seven votes; and Biden received 380,212 of the votes, a net loss of 932 votes.

Iran’s president, Ebraham Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash May 19 during foggy weather. His unexpected death sparked a wave of misinformation online. 

Alex Jones, conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars, wrote May 20 on X, “I have confirmed that all of the satellite weather data for the day of the Iranian president’s crash has been removed.

Minutes earlier, Jones had reshared a post from another X user showing that data from the Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch slider, an online weather tool, was unavailable for May 19, the day Raisi died. 

The application, created by Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, shows users global weather data. 

Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere spokesperson Matt Rogers told PolitiFact that data went offline May 19 while staff were out of the office because of a technical issue related to computer hard drive capacity.

“We had a disk issue where the disk filled up and new data was not posted,” Rogers said in a May 20 email. “All of the imagery we have is now back online, and no data has been removed or deleted.” 

Rogers said the tool receives its Iran weather data from the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, which wasn’t interrupted May 19. “That data has always been available online, even if it was off our site because of our disk issue,” he said. 

PolitiFact used the Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch tool May 21 to access the crash site-area May 19 weather data that had not been initially posted. 

Screenshot of Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch weather data from May 19 in Iran. 

Jones did not answer a request for comment from PolitiFact. 

The tool slider contains a disclaimer saying the product is experimental. “All our products are experimental and aren’t guaranteed to be online in an operational-always-on manner,” Rogers said. “The site is not monitored 24/7 and does suffer from occasional data outages.” 

Social media users have previously complained on X and Reddit that the website is slow to update and has data outages. 

Jones’s X post received a community note in which users shared a link to Zoom Earth, which also showed weather data from May 19 in Iran.

Media outlets reported that the foggy weather during Raisi’s flight could have contributed to the crash. 

We rate the claim that all of the satellite weather data for the day of the Iranian president’s crash has been removed False.